We offer a big shout-out today to Portland's Hawthorne Books for helping us organize last night's Skype chat with A Very Minor Prophet author James Bernard Frost and an even bigger shout-out to Jim for taking the time to chat with us last night (even though he WAS drinking the wrong beer during the chat!).
Topics discussed:
--how autobiographical is this thing anyway? (answer: not as much as you'd think).
--the importance of Fayetteville, Arkansas as the origin of many religious quests.
--zines!!
--the extreme difficulty of reading an unusual manuscript such as this in electronic formats and whether or not it should even be attempted.
--dwarf preachers and why they are important.
A good time was had by all and we look forward to the film version of A Very Minor Prophet (please, please, let it star Peter Dinklage!!).
---
Our May selection is Matt Bell's Cataclysm Baby (are you ready to Skype with us, Matt Bell?).
What does Swamplandia author Karen Russell think:
"In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys."
Check out Matt Bell's site for a great collection of reviews and interviews and tweet along with us at the #pbrbookclub hashtag. And we're on Facebook too: visit us here .
